Castro: I remember feeling very uncomfortable discussing the issue of decadent America and her dangerous liberal values with my hosts up at Stanford. I never really told them I was gay (okay, fine, I pretended that I wasn’t and assumed my goody-two-shoes-around-other-singaporeans persona) and so when I finally got around to SF (by myself, no less, on the Caltrain system) it was a bit of a betrayal that the first thing I did was to visit a gay bookshop in Castro.

But it felt wonderful: just to be in a place where it wasn’t wrong to be gay. It’s not like being in Happy or in Whynot or in Taboo where the homosexuals are happy having no rights (why not, when they can dance the night away and spend the next day at California Fitness, and buy more pink tees?), and in fact it is taboo to be spotted and ratted on.